Yahoo is going to help women SHINE online

Remember last week, when I said "Someone upstairs is answering my prayers." Well, here it is. Yahoo gave an invite only preview of their new online property called Shine designed to appeal to women 25-54 years old. Shine officially launches sometime late March and the url will be http://shine.yahoo.com.

What I saw made me so excited, I cannot begin to tell you. Yahoo also treated all of us like VIPs and put on an impressive event. I was shining from all the awesome food and all the fantastic women I met. Lisa Stone one of the co-founders of BlogHer was there too, and she even gave me a big hug. I felt so honored that she knew me.

The Editor-in-Chief of Shine is Brandon Holley who is the former EIC of JANE and Elle Girl magazine. She is making the shift from print to online because as she said, “more and more people are moving online.” I got a chance to chat with Brandon and wow! She is one cool lady; laid back, approachable, hip, and very open. If Yahoo management leaves her alone to do what she knows best, then I have high hopes for Shine.

Specifically, this is what got me excited like Carrie Bradshaw seeing the new line of Manolos:

A huge tech company is creating a focused effort on leveraging the influence and purchasing power of the female consumer.  Business guru Tom Peters has been screaming about the power of the female consumer for years now, mostly to a deaf audience in tech, but things are changing and Yahoo is going for it big time. If Yahoo is successful with Shine, particularly with ad revenue, watch more techies to follow.

...Yahoo is going after an age demographic with a fat wallet that is mostly ignored by marketers online....

Yahoo is going after an age demographic with a fat wallet that is mostly ignored by marketers online. The general coveted web target groups are teens and 18-35, those young and starting out in life. But what happens online when you turn 36? Poof! Somehow you don’t count as much or aren’t as coveted, and that is such a huge mistake. Yahoo is being smart.

Women over 35 are typically the Chief Purchasing Officer of the home, buy for 3-4 generations on a constant basis (kids, nieces/nephews, their generation, and parents/grandparents), and are far more financially independent than ever before. By targeting an older demographic, Yahoo is going to be able to captilize on the attention of this powerful purchasing group.

The promise of Shine is going to make things far more interesting for many women like me and my friends. Yahoo is going after 25-54 but their sweet spot looks to be 35-45 who feel hip, stylish, and youthful yet are wiser, more insightful, and have more life experiences than the younger 20-somethings. See me do the cabbage patch and party like it’s my birthday.

Shine will give female and lifestyle bloggers the power to leverage the mammoth traffic that comes through Yahoo. Woo-hoo! Prayer answer! As a professional blogger, this made me want to scream from the roof tops, and here’s why. One of the pieces of advice that all the pro blogging and web marketing sites give to help you get more traffic to your blog is to leverage the social media sites like Digg, StumbledUpon, delicious, and Twitter.

The reality though is that these social sites are great to driving traffic to your blog more if you talk about tech, business, politics or guy oriented topics like sports, gaming, science, and anything to do with “hot chicks.” Why? Because the overwhelming majority user of these social network sites are geeky guys or guys who like geeky topics. For example, how often on the front page of Digg do you see a story from a female blogger or a female oriented site or blog? The percentage is small. Another example, Digg or StumbledUpon do not have main categories for fashion, parenting or marriage/weddings which are huge topics for female readers.

Shine will allow women to create their own blog posts to share content (including pictures and video) and link to her own blog. For example, I could do a post on Back in Skinny Jeans like “5 ways to get rid of that muffin top” and then post ways 1-2 on Shine with a link to Back in Skinny Jeans for readers to get ways 3-5. Shine is a way to get traffic from the most visited website in the US.

As well, if the editors of Shine like my post, I will have the opportunity to make it on the front page of Shine or even Yahoo.com. WOW! This is exciting again because Yahoo is the most trafficked site in the U.S., and the majority of people who go to Yahoo are more mainstream users and less of the geeks, and this is good news for us lifestyle and female bloggers who get almost no love on the social sites like Digg and StumbledUpon.

The promise of Shine made this female blogger extremely excited, but the true test will be the execution, the ease of use, and the benefits once Shine is up and running. Meeting Brandon and the rest of the Shine team was a real pleasure. Seriously, I cannot wait to get my Shine-on at Yahoo!